Rumors circulating that Novell is going to kill off its popular Linux desktop lines are completely false. [However,] Novell is making one large strategic change. The GNOME interface is going to become the default interface on both the SLES and Novell Linux Desktop line. KDE libraries will be supplied on both, but the bulk of Novell's interface moving forward will be on GNOME. "The entire KDE graphical interface and product family will continue to be supported and delivered on OpenSuSE."

Way back when I first used Linux I tried Mandrake and it was installed with KDE as the default desktop. After trying Gnome 2.12 on Fedora 4 I fell in love with it. Man has Gnome improved a lot. I recently removed KDE as a startup option since I found I didn't need it anymore. I find the latest version of Nautilus is cleaner than KDE's Konqueror. I use Firefox for browsing so I dropped Konqueror. I think other people and Novell have caught onto these improvements and there is always that KDE licensing problem with applications. I don't think the majority of KDE users are aware that developers making commercial applications have to pay a royalty if they use the QT toolkit. For me this is a good enough reason to avoid KDE.